An Excerpt from The Night I Flunked My Field Trip

“Have you ever heard of someone flunking their field trip? I mean field trips are supposed to be fun, they're not something you get graded on, right? Well, wait until you hear my story. You're not going to believe it. My class was going to spend the night on a replica of a tall-masted sailing ship. I was so psyched! Then I got my ship assignment: Captain's Assistant. That's when the best field trip of the year turned into the worst field trip of the year.” – Hank Zipzer

Chapter One
"Zip, don't tell me you forgot your permission slip," my best friend Frankie Townsend whispered as we slid into our seats in Ms. Adolf's fourth-grade classroom.

"I didn't say I forgot it," I whispered back. "I said I might have forgotten it."

"Dude, I am not liking the sound of this," Frankie said, shaking his head.

I pulled my backpack onto the top of my desk and began a complete search for the permission slip.

"It's got to be here," I told Frankie as I unzipped my backpack and began looking through the main compartment.

"Zip, this is the last day."

"I know," I interrupted, "to bring it in. The field trip is tonight. Why would I forget my permission slip?"

"Because you're Hank Zipzer, King of the Morons," answered a voice from the row behind me. It was Nick McKelty, the true king of the morons, who never misses a chance to hurl an insult my way. He laughed really loud and blasted some of his nasty dragon breath my way.

I know I forget a lot. I mean a lot, a lot. But I really wanted to go on this trip. And I didn't need McKelty on my case about it.

"Listen up, McKelty," I began. "I'm tired of you . . ."

The bell rang before I could continue. Ms. Adolf walked over to her desk and put her sack lunch into her bottom drawer. I sit close enough to her desk to smell that she was having something involving tuna fish. And a day-old banana. I can sniff out a day-old soft, turning-black banana a block away.

"That will be quite enough, Henry," Ms. Adolf said to me, tapping on her desk with this pointer stick she has.

Enough? I hadn't even started. If she only knew.

"But, Ms. Adolf, I didn't start this."

"Henry, if you keep talking, I'm going to send you to Principal Love's office."

Why was I getting into trouble? McKelty called me a moron. And why was she still calling me Henry when I've been telling her since September my name is Hank? Come on, this was April already. That's eight months of Henry and zero months of Hank. Even my orthodontist Dr. Gibbons started calling me Hank four months after I had asked him to, and he's deaf in one ear.

Ms. Adolf took the silver key she wears on a lanyard around her neck and unlocked the top drawer of her desk. She took out her roll book and carried it over to my desk. Opening the book, she ran her finger down the list of names, stopping at the very last one. I had a bad feeling about that, since my name is Zipzer, and it starts with the last letter of the alphabet.

Sure enough, Ms. Adolf looked at me over the top of her glasses and frowned. And I don't mean just a regular frown, either. She looked at me like there were worms crawling all over my face. Brown, hairy worms.

"Congratulations, Henry," she said in a voice that matched her face. "You are the only pupil who has not turned in his permission slip."

"I'm sure it's in here, Ms. Adolf," I said, practically diving headfirst into my backpack.

Ms. Adolf folded her arms across her grey shirt. She tapped her foot impatiently. She was wearing grey shoes with a grey buckle on them. Grey is her favorite color. That's because it goes so nicely with her grey face.

"I'm waiting," Ms. Adolf said. As if the whole class hadn't noticed.

Wow, this was a lot of pressure. Everyone in the class stared at me, except Luke Whitman, that is, who was scratching a rash on his arm with one of his vocabulary flash cards.

I pulled out a crumpled paper from the bottom of my backpack. At first, I thought it was the permission slip. But when I uncrumpled it, I saw that it was last week's math quiz, the one with the big red C-minus on top.

Tap, tap, tap. Ms. Adolf's feet were going faster. She was getting pretty mad.

The zipper pouch! That's it. I bet I stuffed the permission slip in my zipper pouch.

I pulled my head out of the bag and said, "I think I know where it is!" Then I dove back in.

I dug around in the zipper pouch and finally pulled out a half-eaten granola bar. It had a clump of greenish lint from the bottom of my backpack hanging off of it. You're probably thinking it's gross to have a linty, old granola bar crammed in your backpack, but if you saw the kind of granola bar my mom gives me for a snack, trust me, you'd stuff it in your zipper pouch too. My mom doesn't believe in granola bars that have chocolate chips and marshmallows and fun stuff in them. That would be the kind that taste good. She gives me what she calls health-nola bars. That would be the kind that taste like brown construction paper.

Tap, tap, tap. Ms. Adolf's feet were certainly getting a workout. Now she was getting those red splotches on her neck too. They start appearing when I'm late or if anybody laughs in class.

"Mr. Zipzer, all permission slips were due no later than this morning," she said.

Uh-oh. It's bad enough that Ms. Adolf calls me Henry. Now it was Mr. Zipzer!

This called for extreme action. I turned my entire backpack upside down and dumped everything out on my desk. A whole bunch of crumbs and broken pencil stubs and Snapple tops and a pink high bounce came tumbling out. It wasn't a pretty sight. Worst of all, there was no permission slip anywhere.

Ms. Adolf shook her head.

"I told you yesterday, Henry, that if I did not have your signed permission slip this morning, you would not be allowed to go on the field trip tonight."

"NO!" I shouted. Whoops. I meant to say that to myself. She wouldn't make me miss this field trip, would she?

There are some field trips I wouldn't mind missing. Like the one in second grade when we took the bus to the pumpkin patch and Luke Whitman got carsick and threw up all over my new Converse high-tops. I could've missed that.

But tonight's field trip wasn't just any old one. It was the coolest one ever. Our entire fourth-grade class was going to spend the night on The Pilgrim Spirit, a tall sailing ship that was docked in New York Harbor. And that's not all. We were going to sleep over on the ship and live just like the sailors of long ago did. That means we were going to do neat things like stand watch and tie knots and sing sea songs with the captain and crew.

And now Ms. Adolf was telling me that I couldn't go? No way.

"Ms. Adolf, this isn't fair," I said.

"It's a school rule, and we cannot just break it any old time we choose," she said. "We cannot let you go on a field trip without your parents' permission, Henry. That's final."

"But my dad signed the permission slip this morning," I said. "Just before he left for his crossword puzzle convention. In green ink!"

Another blast of bad breath came flying across the room and hit me in the face like a stinky ball of burning rubber.

"A crossword puzzle convention!" Nick the Tick hooted. "Could your family be any nerdier?"

I have to confess, my family is what some people might call nerdy. Like my sister Emily has a pet iguana named Katherine and they both like to eat sardines. And my dad loves to do crossword puzzles in his boxer shorts at the end of the dining room table we don't eat on. He's a crossword puzzle nut. I mean, he'll wake up in the middle of the night just to write down a seven-letter word for monkey fur. And my mom, all you need to know about her is that her favorite thing to cook is wheatgrass noodle casserole with blueberry flecks. And then there's our dog, Cheerio. When he's not spinning in circles, he likes to lick the bricks on the fireplace just for fun.

But me thinking my family is a little on the nerdy side is a whole lot different than Nick the Tick mouthing off about it. He wasn't getting away with this.

"For your information, McKelty," I said, turning around to face him. "My dad once finished an entire New York Times crossword puzzle in four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. That's a tri-county record."

"Big deal," snorted McKelty. "My dad once shook hands with the king of Ethiopia."

"Like that has anything to do with anything," piped up Ashley Wong, my other best friend, who was sitting across the aisle from me.

Ashley hates it when McKelty brags, especially since most of what he says isn't true, anyway. Like in this case, maybe Nick McKelty saw a map of Ethiopia once. Suddenly, he makes it seem like his dad is best friends with the king. We call this the McKelty Factor" truth times a hundred.

Ashley went over to McKelty's desk. Even though he's huge and she's little and wears glasses, Ashley's not afraid of McKelty. She says he's all hot air. Rotting food, bad-smelling hot air, I might add. Don't his parents encourage him to brush?

I'm not sure exactly what Ashley was planning to do, but Ms. Adolf didn't like the look of things and hurried over to settle the argument. That gave Frankie a chance to talk to me.

"Take a deep breath, Zip, and fill your brain with oxygen," he said.

Frankie's mom is a yoga teacher. She's so flexible, she can touch the back of her head with the tips of her toes. She's been telling us since we were little that oxygen is brain food. I took a deep breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, just like Frankie's mom had taught us.

"Now think, Zippola," Frankie went on, "because your field trip future depends on this. What did you do with the permission slip?"

I played back the morning in my mind, like rewinding a tape from Blockbuster.

"I got out of bed and took a really long pee."

"Nix the yucky details," said Frankie.

"I got a pen. Got the permission slip from my three-ring binder."

"Now you're talking," Frankie nodded. "Then what?" 

"Took the permission slip to my dad. Had him sign it. Put it on the hall table under the Chinese vase. Got dressed. Put on my green jacket. Kissed my mom good-bye. Grabbed my backpack. Ran out of the house."

"And forgot the permission slip under the Chinese vase," said Frankie.
Bingo!

There it was.

At least I knew the location of the permission slip. Now all I had to do was get it - immediately, if not sooner!

© 2004 by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver. Reprinted with permission.

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